ABSTRACT
Thomas Chatterton and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and indeed Ossian, three very different figures, nevertheless merged in the nineteenth century into a composite or typological forger that was then deployed in different ways by writers from Charles Dickens to Oscar Wilde. For readers of Chatterton, the life validates and even overcomes the work, but the work does remain acknowledged. Wainewright, however, exemplifies the triumph of biographical reinvention at the expense of his writing and painting. He was doggedly fictionalized by nineteenth-century commentators, becoming a stranger to himself. Wilde specifically took the amphibian Wainewright as the prototype of the dandy aesthete and the genius of a diabolical and seductive version of 'art for art's sake'; indeed, Wilde's prototype of the amoral artist draws on the whole eighteenth-century dynasty of James Macpherson, Chatterton, and Ireland, as well as Wainewright. In other words, the aesthete could trace his pedigree back to the 'house of forgery'.
